


Dreamers Often Lie

by samalander



Series: Like a Liar Would Believe [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, F/M, M/M, Memory, Memory Alteration, Soviet Union, Spies & Secret Agents, Steve Rogers Feels, coffeemaker arms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:16:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/434090">The Only Soldier Now is Me</a>; in which Natasha and Clint chase Lev, Lev is not who anyone thinks he is, and Steve needs answers just as badly as anyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreamers Often Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.  
> Mercutio: And so did I.  
> Romeo: Well, what was yours?  
> Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.  
> Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true?  
> -Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, scene iv.
> 
> All the thanks in the world to [enigma731](http://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731) who routinely stayed up until 1am having word wars so that I would finish this damn thing and then STILL BETAED IT because she is the scary kind of awesome, and to [sugarfey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarfey) whose arms must be tired from waving those pompoms so much. I love you both.
> 
> And an apology to all my readers who wanted this story a year ago when Only Soldier came out. It's been a long ride, and I thank you for your patience.

The short story goes like this: man found in ice without memory or left arm, taken in by covert forces and made into unstoppable killing machine.

The long story involves a boy, a girl, a couple more boys, and years of sleep.

* * *

Lev didn't remember.

He knew there was a life before, a time growing up and getting here, but he didn't remember it, didn't think he ever would.

He remembered waking up and having to be taught, like a baby, how to speak and read and not shit himself. He remembered the gift of his arm, the gift of a name and an identity. He remembered who the Winter Soldier was, and the price he'd paid. He remembered Natashenka, warm and pliant in his bed, he remembered her blood on his shirt when he took her down to sleep.

And he remembered jobs.

He remembered waking and waking and waking, no time between but the world moving forward and his dreams, a thousand dreams of lives he'd never lived and places he'd never gone. A blue-eyed boy with golden hair, a game in the street, a mountain sheathed in fog. He woke and he woke and he woke and the dreams receded, and he walked in the world and he killed.

And then he slept again.

The last time they woke him, they woke him in a frenzy, they spat words about aliens and Gods and he wondered who these people were, what kind of Communists, that they would embrace any God at all, even one they'd met.

But they didn't tell him to kill anyone. They didn't give him a gun - they thrust a microphone into his hands and pointed a camera at him.

"Tell the world," a woman said - and he didn't know who she was, only that she had the code words and she could tell him what to do - "that the Black Widow is a traitor. Tell them we do not recognize the word Avenger as any kind of power, and tell them to return our rogue asset."

He thought for a long moment about words, about how he could say the things she demanded. And then he stared down the lens of the camera.

"Natalia Alianovna Romanova," he said, "the Black Widow, is an enemy of the state, and should be returned to us for justice."

* * *

They showed him footage, his Natashenka fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back with Captain America, the very man they were created to destroy, the enemy of the people.

They showed him the footage of the battle that aired on the news, and something stirred in him. It wasn't because of Natashenka, no. He knew her, and he loved her and he paid for that love.

Captain America stood, his cowl blown off or removed, who knew, and it was for him that Lev's stomach twisted. He saw the blue eyes and the straw-colored hair, the jaw and the hands and he thought _I know that man_.

He couldn't know that man, not any more than he knew the archer or the monster, but still, there was a familiarity in his gut that he could not shake.

When his handlers slept, Lev crept out of the room they'd given him and into the control room, where they kept their information.

And he found a name there, a town in the Harz Mountains in Germany, where they'd recovered his body.

Lev smiled to himself and secreted the information away until a week or so later, when Dr. Sokolova had her back turned. He smashed her across the back of the head with the IV stand, and made his way to the street, to freedom. To Germany.

* * *

"Sir, this really isn't necessary."

Director Fury scowled at Natasha. "You called in an emergency extraction team because of a TV signal that we have no record of."

Natasha, using all of the strength of will that she possessed, did not slam her hand on the table, because they'd been going back and forth about this for a day and a half, since she and Clint returned from Bishkek in a frenzy.

Fury wanted her to go under Hill's care again, wanted to test her for hallucinations, because Clint didn't _speak_ Russian and had no way of corroborating her story.

They said it was PTSD from the battle, that she was remembering Lev because she needed something stable.

She didn't laugh in their faces, but it was a tight squeeze. Lev was an earthquake, an avalanche; he shook Natasha to her core. _Stable_ wasn't even skirting the truth.

"Sir," Clint spoke for the first time since the initial debrief, which was heartening because Natasha had wondered if he'd gone into some kind of hibernation of his own.

Fury gestured for him to speak.

"Do you trust me right now, sir?" Clint asked.

Fury sighed heavily. "You're not shackled, are you?"

Clint shook his head. "You trust me, I trust Natasha."

Natasha felt her heart flutter at that, at the idea that he _trusted_ her, the stray he'd brought in from the cold, enough to make his gesture.

Fury shook his head. "I don't like it."

Clint nodded. "I hear that, sir. Give us sub-q trackers, set a team on us. But give us permission to chase this guy."

"I suppose if I don't, you two will break out of whatever cell I put you into and go anyway," Fury said.

Clint gave a grin that Natasha had always categorized as insubordinate, but Fury let him get away with, for whatever reason.

"All right," Fury sighed. "I'll give you a week."

Natasha shook her head. "A month. We need a month to find him."

Fury glanced from Clint to Natasha and back again before sighing heavily. "If it were anyone else--"

"Thank you," Natasha breathed.

"If you're out of radio contact for more than 48 hours," Fury cautioned, "I will send Stark and Rogers to pick you up and bring you back."

Clint smirked. "You think Steve and Tony could find us?"

Fury made some kind of face that, on anyone else, might have been a smile, but on him was just a vaguely terrifying grimace. "No, but I can."

Natasha, against all reason, laughed.

And two days later, trackers implanted in both of their necks, she and Clint headed out to find her past.

* * *

Lev had been casing the small village for two weeks, and he'd learned nothing.

He'd become accustomed to the rhythm of life there, the women and their milk pails and the men and their guns, hunting and foraging like it was still the 1800s. It felt right, somehow, even homey, and he wondered again where he was really from, that people living off the land felt natural.

He had only a moment to wonder, though, before he heard a whistle of wind and an arrow slammed him in the shoulder. An actual fucking arrow, the kind that got shot from a bow. He hit the snow, red blood staining where he fell, and he rolled, trying to distract the bowman before he got another shot off. 

The pain was manageable and the snow numbed his arm, but there was a lot of red, a lot of blood staining the ground. Too much. He yanked the arrow free from his flesh, heedless of the damage it caused, and hauled himself to his feet, unwary for the time being, but ready to dodge and weave as he needed to escape to the treeline.

She stood like a ghost, a white hooded coat belted at her waist with a buckle that bore a red hourglass. Her hair was the color of blood - but short, shorter than he'd ever seen it - slipping out to discolor the white fur that framed her face, the way he left blood on the snow.

Natasha.

"Come on, Lyova," she said, extending her hand, "come with me."

He blinked twice, trying to clear his eyes. Was she really there? Had she come for him? No one called him Lyova, he didn't even call himself that. It was her name, and her name alone.

"Not on your life," he choked out. Slowly, he used his thumb to activate the spike built into his hand by those lovely scientists. It extended, glistening and deadly and small enough to miss.

"You can't win," she told him. "You're injured, and you could never beat me in a fight."

She was a traitor. He clung to that truth, to the veracity of the footage, her fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Captain America. 

"I never could," he agreed, and reached his hand out.

She was a fool. She took his hand, and the spike punctured her glove. He watched the shock on her face, felt her heart jump as she reacted to his move.

"Lyova?"

He smiled cruelly--because that was what you did to your enemies, you smiled at them--and watched as she lost her footing and crumpled to the snow. It was a weak poison, but a strong sedative.

He felt eyes on him, saw the glint of a scope out of the corner of his eye. Still smiling, Lev scooped up Natasha's prone body and used it as a shield between him and the sniper, backing up slowly until he reached the treeline. 

When they reached cover, Lev fished a metal canister out of his pocket. He stared, unblinkingly, into the glint of the scope. "It's the antidote," he said, because any sniper worth their salt should be able to read lips. Then he stretched back and threw the canister as far as he could. "Come and get her," he sneered.

He dropped Natasha's limp body unceremoniously on the ground, and ran for the snowmobile he had in the forest, the one that moved soundlessly over the ground without tracks. He cursed that he'd had to hurt her, hated that she might not survive this, depending on how the archer reacted, but more than any of that, he hated that he'd spent two weeks in the snow with no new information. He turned the snowmobile northwest, towards Hanover. Something told him Natashenka would expect him to go to Berlin, because he knew Berlin - well, East Berlin - but he had no intention of staying in Germany any longer than he needed to.

* * *

Anger throbbed through Natasha, cold and violent. She remembered everything. She remembered too much. She hated and hated and hated, she waited for the hate to consume her, to become nothing, just a machine, like she was before.

 _Three, seven, ace,_ she thought, the words beating in time to her heartbeat. _Three, seven, widow._

Nothing changed, but nothing was going to.

She cracked an eye, and the world glowed gray around her, the color of light shining through fabric. She heard the steady crack of wet wood in a fire from outside, the sound of something boiling. She opened her eyes the rest of the way, and the world rushed back into focus, memories and dread and blood on the snow.

"Lev," she breathed, and pulled her legs - her feet are bare - out of the sleeping bag she was swaddled in.

But it wasn't Lev tending the fire outside, it was Clint, reliable Clint, who eyed her with suspicion before he spoke.

"Put on shoes," he said. "It's snowy out."

She knew it was a joke, but she didn't laugh. She'd never had a parent to scold her like that, and it didn't seem funny to be scolded as an adult. She hadn't felt much like laughing since the satellites picked up a rogue power signature that they thought might be Lev's arm in these mountains a few days ago - she felt strung tight, like all the laughter in the world wouldn't help.

"What happened?" she asked, reaching into the tent for her boots and slipping her feet into them, the fur lining warm and dry against her chilled skin.

"Your buddy poisoned you," Clint said, poking at the fire. "Well, he said it was poison. Mostly you were sleeping, and your respiration seemed normal, so once I got you injected with his antidote, I let you be. It was probably just a sedative."

Natasha felt dizzy, all of a sudden, and sank to her knees in the snow. "Did you catch him?"

Clint raised an eyebrow. "No, I saved you instead."

 _Wrong choice_ , she thought, but she didn't dare say it, not with the look Clint would give her if she did.

"We need to find him," she said.

He nodded. "Of course we do. But it looks like he's turned his arm off, the signal is gone."

Natasha thought of all the curse words she knew, all the names she'd like to call Lev, but none of them were strong enough, nothing in her vocabulary seemed to be able to convey the fog of emotions that were warring in her chest. "We need to find him," she said again, because she honestly had no idea what else she could say.

"Nat." Clint almost whispered it, and she schooled her face back to stillness. "He's-- why do we need to find him?"

"He's dangerous," she said. "He's HYDRA."

"Right," Clint poked the fire again. "And your old boyfriend."

Natasha felt like she'd been punched in the stomach - all the air evacuated her lungs, and in the moment she was left gasping. "Is that what you think this is about?"

Clint shrugged, which she recognized from him as a stand-down - it was the closest thing to regret for that statement she'd get. They locked eyes for a moment before she realized she was still on her knees in the snow, and he scooted over on the logs he was sitting on, gesturing for her to join him.

She did, holding her hands out to the fire.

The silence was at least companionable for a moment, and she leaned in and nudged him with her shoulder, which elicited a small smile from him.

"Are you cooking?" she asked, and he nodded.

"Hobo stew," he said. "I shot a rabbit, like a real caveman. Figured we should preserve our supplies."

She nodded and stared at the flames for a moment, allowing herself to imagine him hunting, killing, skinning the kill. She remembered the market at Nowy Kleparz, the leg of lamb she'd imagined him eating raw all those years ago. She smiled, thinly. 

"What now?" he asked, reaching out to stir the pot.

"Now," she said, because she knew, she always knew what this was going to come to, "Now you wait for new orders, and I take off."

"No," he said, shaking his head.

"You can't stop me."

"Not in a million years," he agreed. "But if you're going rogue, I'm going with you."

She couldn't ask him to do that, couldn't let him throw away his career with SHIELD over her. She was barely tolerated there - well, it had been better than before, thanks to the whole "Avengers" thing, and Coulson's trust, but Clint was Fury's man, in a way Natasha had never been. She was expected to go rogue. He wasn't.

And it hinged on her- she could stop him from coming with her, but she couldn't stop him from following. And he would follow. He had followed her across Europe before, and he'd barely known her then. 

"What do you propose?" she asked, and he grinned. 

"I propose we call base and tell them we're going to follow him."

Natasha furrowed her brow. "That makes an uncommon amount of sense for you."

He laughed. "Well, you seem to be all about nonsense, so I thought it was only fair that I be the levelheaded one."

She gave him a smile for that, because he wasn't wrong - one of them did have to be rational, and it was usually her. He was usually too busy playing cowboy to be rational.

"So," she said. "A plan. We spend the night here, and in the morning we go after him."

He nodded. "You know where he'll go?"

"No," she said, and he smiled wryly.

"I do."

She waited for him to say more, but he leaned forward and dipped a spoon into his bubbling concoction instead.

"How?"

He grinned and tossed something at her - something small and rectangular. She caught it with one hand and held it in her palm. "A memory card?" she asked.

He nodded again. "I figured as long as I was pointing and shooting, I could get some glamour shots of our guy."

She was genuinely impressed, but that was the kind of thing Clint thought about, the kind of planning he came up with when she wasn't looking.

"So you sent them back to Hill?"

"Of course. "

"And you know where he's going?"

"We think he's headed to Hanover," Clint said. "And we expect he'll jump a train from there. Probably back to Moscow."

She nodded. Of course. "If he's not going to Moscow," she said, "He'll head to Volgograd." 

Clint didn't ask questions, and for that she was grateful. Instead he spooned a helping of soup into a bowl and handed it to her. She accepted, and they ate in silence.

* * *

_the stick is clenched tight in his hands, sweat pooling on his palms as he stands and waits._

_the other boy throws the ball and lev swings - but he's not lev, not yet - and the ball flies outward, out and over the fence._

_a voice screams in the darkness_

* * *

Natasha paced the hotel room, restless or anxious or both. Clint watched with half an eye, most of his attention on his bow. It needed to be oiled and restrung, and there were fletchings to mend, but there was also Natasha, wearing a groove in the floorboards.

"Do you want to eat?" he asked, and she looked at him for a long moment, like she had forgotten he existed.

He had nightmares about that look.

"No," she said. "I want to know what's taking Korovin so long."

He knew she'd sent out feelers, but the name Korovin pinged a thread in his mind, and a night holed up in a nest in Yemen drifted across his memory, the night when she told him the story of Drakov's daughter. Kovorin was the man she sold the girl to. If she was calling Korovin, she was calling in all the favors she had.

"We could check the compound again," he offered. "In case Lev disarmed your sensor."

She sighed and nodded, and he gladly put his bow down. Walking somewhere, getting out of the room and doing something other than years of endless waiting - that seemed like the best idea anyone had had in a long time. He tossed her a jacket, and they stepped into the blustery street.

* * *

_she is too young for him, too young by half and half again - all of sixteen, he thinks, barely old enough to make choices, let alone to crawl into his bed._

_into his heart._

_but she does, a little ball of flame and anger, the brightest star in the red room - his natashenka._

_"your name means birthday," he mutters into her hair, after the first time they lie together, and she stirs._

_"what?"_

_he shrugs. he's not even sure how he knew. but her name means birthday, and his means lion, and he can't even make a joke out of that, can't spin it to cleverness, so he just shakes his head._

_"nothing."_

* * *

He didn't know what he was looking for in Moscow.

Well, actually he did. Kind of.

He was looking for information, for whatever the Red Room - and his handlers since, whoever they were - had been hiding from him. He was looking for a name, a picture, a hint. Anything.

Because he had to be someone before he was Lev. He had to have been born and grown up.

He eased up the hatch, and dropped into the Red Room facility.

He'd seen compounds like this one before, he'd been woken up in them - and put back to sleep. Every time he finished a mission they brought him to a compound like this, Red Room or HYDRA or whatever they call themselves this time, and they told him to lay on the cold metal tables.

He knew where the computers were, and he was pretty sure he knew how to coax information out of them, if there was any to be found.

And he knew that if they caught him there, if Dr. Sokolova and her friends came calling, they'd put him to sleep again, and he would have another lifetime of dreams before he got another shot.

So he would have to be brief, he decided, and turned the computer on.

He had only worked a few minutes, only gotten in far enough to know that he existed independent of name, when he heard the noise. It was a soft footstep behind him, and he had a knife in his hand before he turned, ready and willing to throw it through the heart of the man there.

He didn't know the man he saw, but the man had a bow and an arrow trained on Lev, and that could only mean he had been the one with the scope in the German mountains.

"Archer," Lev said, smirking. "How is Natalia?"

He felt the air change as soon as her name was past his lips, but before he could even quantify what was different, there was a sharp prick on the side of his neck, and the room started to spin slightly.

He felt consciousness slipping from him, but in the twilight of his awareness, he heard her voice.

"I'm just fine," she said, and Lev didn't know anything more.

* * *

He woke in a hospital, which, for Lev, was actually relatively normal. What wasn't normal was the feeling of restraints tight across his chest and his legs; the feeling of weight and confinement settling like a stone in his stomach. He realized with a lurch that his arm was missing, too, which was an empty, violent feeling that he didn't know how to compensate for. He tried to talk, tried to demand the passcode, if only because he had to assess his handlers, but all he could manage was a low moan. He'd never felt this kind of lethargy before, not when he'd been woken.

A woman coalesced into his field of vision - someone he'd never seen before, but that wasn't new. He'd almost never seen his handlers before. That was why they had the passcodes.

"My name is Hill," the woman was saying, and her voice crashed like a wave against his ear; she was American. That wasn't the watchword. He began to struggle, began to fight.

"Lyova."

The voice belonged to Natalia, no longer his Natashenka, not while she was allied with these people, whoever they were.

He groaned in response - something was wrong with his throat, someone had done something to his vocal chords, and if he had the ability, he would scream.

"No one is going to hurt you," Natalia said. He knew she was lying. Everyone was going to hurt him, everyone was always going to hurt him. It was the way of the world - people hurt each other, and they did it because of their own pain.

"You're with SHIELD," the woman in his vision - Hill, yes that was it, Hill - said. "We want to talk to you."

He would tell them nothing.

Hill started rattling off questions- name, rank, serial number -and all Lev could do was swallow around the lump that used to be his voice, and try to stare a bullet into the space between her eyes.

* * *

Natasha wanted to hurt someone. She had a feral, primal anger in her heart that made her want to cold-cock every agent she walked by, but instead she dug her nails into the palms of her hands and felt her knuckles strain against her skin. She had to keep control. She had to.

Lev had been with them for two days. Two fucking days, and nothing new had come out of him - in part, Natasha suspected, because he didn't know anything. 

They'd been trying to cross-reference his face with known Soviet aliases, but all they knew now was what Natasha could have told them - this was the same man who was the Winter Soldier in 1950, and he was responsible for a string of deaths across time - a string of deaths that made her own hit count look minuscule. He had been killing people for as long as she had slept, popping up through history to perform hits, and it seemed that he hadn't aged at all.

She wanted to help him, because she had always wanted that - she had always wanted to find him, and she had always loved him, but the man in medical was not the man she knew. Or she was not the girl he loved. Something was wrong, because her stomach didn't twist at the thought of him, and he didn't look at her with anything but hatred anymore.

Clint had been running Lev's face through databases for what felt like an eternity, and yet he was no closer to a name. Nothing was working. Nothing at all.

And it made Natasha homicidal.

She was only vaguely surprised to find Steve Rogers in the gym when she got there, beating yet another punching bag halfway to hell. 

"Are you just passionately anti-punching bag?" she asked, by way of greeting.

She saw the smile creep along his lips. It had been a little over a month since they'd fought together, and she had been away for most of that gap, trailing Lev with Barton. But still, she liked Steve. She thought that it probably had something to do with the unflinching way in which he accepted Clint onto the team, but it could be Coulson's exuberance echoing back from- well, odds being what they were, either a Swiss chalet or the grave. That one was pretty even.

"When did you get back?" Steve asked, landing another punch, and sand leaked from a seam.

"Two days ago."

He nodded. "Have a nice vacation?"

"Not really a vacation."

"Huh," he said, landing one last punch before the bag ripped free of its chains, slamming against the opposite wall with a resounding, satisfying thunk. "A mission?"

"Of a sort."

Steve ran a hand through his hair and turned to face her. He was barely sweating, little beads of perspiration dotting his hairline. And she'd forgotten how blue his eyes were, the same desperately sweet kind of blue that Lev used to turn on her in training rooms halfway across the world and a lifetime ago.

"An old-" she hesitated. " _Colleague_ of mine popped up," she told him, and he didn't react, which was strange and wonderful. "Clint and I went to bring him in. Now we want to know who he is."

Steve nodded. "Not a talker?"

"Honestly?" Natasha sighed. "I don't think he knows."

Steve smiled sweetly, which was too much for Natasha. It had been far too long since someone with eyes like his smiled sweetly at her, and she found the story tumbling out of her- how she met Lev, how they trained, and the last time she saw him, his bullet burning hot in her shoulder.

She told Steve about Lev's arm, his code name, and the cold sweeping slope and distant train whistle of the German mountains.

Steve seemed to tense up as she talked. If she had to put a name to it, she'd say he looked itchy. But there was no reason this story would have that effect of him. She chalked it up to projection, and told him about the quiet, frigid days in the safehouse in Moscow, opening all kinds of emotional doors and windows that she'd never wanted to crack again.

Finally, she finished the story, told Steve about finding Lev in the abandoned Red Room compound, about paying him back for the bullet and the drugging, and about bringing him back to HQ.

Steve narrowed his eyes. "He's here." It wasn't a question; Steve knew well enough that Lev was here, but Natasha agreed anyway, tired from the long tale.

"Can you take me to him?" Steve asked, and his voice was soft, almost childlike in its innocence. It didn't suit him.

"Yes," she said, and turned to go, Steve's even, heavy footsteps behind her.

He didn't say anything as they walked, and neither did she, but she paused outside the secure medical ward - the same one they kept her in, all those years ago - and her fingers hovered over the keypad.

"Why do you want to see him?" she asked, and Steve blinked.

"I need to know he's not who I want him to be."

She had a thousand and seven questions about that, but she wasn't sure Steve would answer them if she asked.

So she tapped in her access code, and led Steve into the ward.

* * *

When Natasha had been talking, the words had settled around Steve, lodged in his consciousness the way fruit floated in jell-o, which didn't seem to be particularly poetic, but it was the only way he could understand it. Words like _German mountains_ and _blue eyes_ and _train whistle_.

Bucky was dead. That was one of the few things that Steve knew for sure. He had watched Bucky fall, tumbling into the mist, too fast for Steve to do anything about.

Bucky was dead. They had died the same way, and that was kinda okay with Steve.

Well, it had been, until he had woken up and been alive, without Bucky.

So the man in medical, Natasha's Winter Soldier, he couldn't be Bucky. No matter how much Steve wanted him to be. No matter how much hope he had. And yet, there was an itch in the back of Steve's mind, a demanding little voice that told him to go and see, to go check. To make sure.

Because if he didn't, he was never going to be satisfied, he would always wonder if it could have been Bucky. If he didn't, he would probably lose his mind.

Natasha led him, heels clicking on the linoleum, into the secure ward. With every step, Steve's heart sank. It wasn't going to be Bucky. There was no way. There was no chance. The hope was silly, it was infantile, but Steve couldn't shake it.

And he knew that when she drew the curtain drew back, when the face staring back was a stranger, his heart would break. But he had to see, anyway.

Natasha paused at a door on the far side of the ward and pressed her thumb into a sensor, which buzzed and flashed green, before stepping back and giving him a long look.

"His name is Lev," she said, and there was a sadness in her voice, a sadness he'd never heard from her before. It made her seem more real, somehow, more human. Steve tucked it away, to pull out later and consider: _Natasha is human, Natasha feels sad._ It wasn't for now.

She opened the door, and Steve stepped through.

The room was crowded with equipment; beeping and flashing and doing the things that equipment did, but in the middle of the mess, on a small white bed, was a man whose left arm ended just below his shoulder.

The man sneered at Natasha, and Steve thought for a moment that he might spit at her, might actually rear back and try to attack, but he didn't. Instead his eyes flashed to Steve.

"Bucky," Steve breathed. "Bucky."

He had fully expected to be disappointed. He had been prepared, the way you prepare for a monster to jump out in a movie, but you still get scared when it does. What he wasn't prepared for, what he had no ability to cope with, was the blank look in the man's eyes.

"Bucky," Steve said again, pushing Natasha aside to get to the bed. "I thought you were dead."

The man's eyes were still blank and empty. Steve wanted something, he wanted to be told that he should be shorter; that was what Bucky was supposed to say when he came back from the dead.

But this man just stared, and spit something at Natasha in Russian.

She translated without being asked. "He wants to know why Captain America is pretending that he's his friend, but don't be fooled. He speaks perfect English."

Steve felt the bile welling in the back of his throat, torn now between staying to try and convince Bucky that he was Bucky, and getting the fuck out of the room.

"I-- we grew up together," he said, and whether he was talking to Natasha or Bucky, he wasn't sure. "James Barnes. Bucky. He enlisted before I did. The 107th, the Howling Commandoes. Died--" Steve coughed. "Died the same-- fell off of Schmitt's train."

Bucky didn't even blink at the words. He just kept his scowl affixed to Steve's face, cruel and unyielding.

"Liar," Bucky hissed, in English this time, and Steve's heart, which had been fighting with valiant hope that maybe Bucky's memory just needed to be jogged, finally gave up the ghost and shattered into a million tiny pieces littered across the floor.

"Okay," Steve said, turning away and striding to the door. He kept his gait steady, steeling himself not to look back. There was no point in inviting that kind of pain back in.

* * *

Lev - or, as his captors liked to insist, "Bucky" - had been in the secure ward for what he was relatively sure was a week. At least a week, because he was counting his meals, and he was confident that, whatever their end, SHIELD was not overly invested in his disorientation. They seemed to be more interested in convincing him that he was an American man from the 1940s.

( _and if he has a dream, a persistent, lying dream, wherein his palms are sweaty and the air is sweet and the kiss is like manna, there is an explanation. he just needs to find it._ )

He was not what they wanted him to be, but he could see how Natalia let them mold her, he could understand why she allowed them to make her theirs. 

It was nighttime - and time was easy to judge, because there were fewer people and the lights were dimmed - on the seventh day of his incarceration, when the building started to shake.

He wasn't sure, at first, if the building was shaking. Half asleep as he was, Lev thought of a train, juddering along a mountainside, shaking his moorings and rattling his teeth. But as coherence returned to him, as truth seeped into his skin, he recognized the secure ward, the strap heavy across his chest and the soft beeping of the machines.

The door slammed open, bouncing against the wall and wobbling as it swung. He knew the woman standing there, knew what her face would be before it resolved into features.

"Dr. Sokolova," Lev said, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He'd never thought in a million years that he'd see her again, especially not in this place, her hair flying loose from her bun and a pistol clutched in her hand.

"Winter Soldier," she replied, crossing to free him from the restraints. "Ready to go?"

"More than ready," he said, accepting the gun she pressed into his hand as she freed it.

He followed her out of the room and into the stairwell, up and out onto the roof. He killed a few men on the way - three, maybe, six at the most - before emerging into the stiff wind of helicopter blades.

"After you," Dr. Sokolova said, gesturing, and Lev stepped up into the craft.

* * *

His return was uneventful - one day he was in a SHIELD ward, the next day he was on a different bed, strapped to a different table, with Dr. Sokolova peering down at him and making clucking noises.

Lev was far too comfortable with clucking noises, and the doctors who invariably made them.

They were fitting him with a new arm, one that they said would do more, faster, better. It was sleeker, that was for sure, but it didn't feel right. It didn't sit with the comfort that his old arm - the one SHIELD stole - had. And it did things, weird things that he wasn't used to. Touch here and you can shoot electricity. Twist this, it made a cup of coffee. It was too modern for him. The doctors kept apologizing for it, as if it was their choice to replace the old arm, as if they were the ones who stole it, and Dr. Sokolova kept talking about neural implants, about the ability to control the arm when it wasn't attached, ways to make it do even newer and better things.

Lev had no illusions about his handlers rooting around in his mind; he was sure they'd done it before and would do it again. But the idea of implants, the kind that could be triggered to explode if he was caught again, made his skin crawl. The idea made him itch. He told them as much, which only resulted in a few half-hearted chuckles.

"Why would we kill you?" Sokolova asked, and Lev had to admit that she had a point. He was an expensive asset. They had broken in to save him from SHIELD, and he knew that they must have lost a few men in the frontal assault on that building, because they had _broken in_ to _SHIELD headquarters_ , and that was no small feat. Not if the intelligence they'd shown him since, the plan of their assault and the logistics of taking the building off the power grid, were any indication. 

(He could have done it better, could have found three or four hundred ways to tweak the plan to minimize casualty, but they were working without him and on a deadline. He would give them credit for a successful mission, even if some of the planning was downright sloppy.)

The handlers treated him with kid gloves, and Lev knew why. He knew they thought he was compromised, that SHIELD had managed to crawl inside his brain like they had with Natalia, that he would suddenly decide to be against them, to join Captain America in his fight for whatever it was Captain America fought for these days. Cheeseburgers, maybe, or something else American.

He'd been back with his people for four days, his new arm was still being tinkered with, but Lev knew what was coming once they got it right. They'd put him back on ice, put him to sleep until he could be verified as loyal. He would be kept in stasis for as long as they chose, and he would get no say in the matter. He was a gun, a bullet, a missile. Not a person, not the kind of thing that got choices.

And that had never bothered him before, never even piqued his interest. But something about Natalia, about the Americans she worked with, had got him worried about being put away. Like a toy in the toybox, stuffed in and forgotten until they wanted to play again.

"Can I prove my loyalty?" he asked Dr. Sokolova on the sixth day, as she was making an adjustment to something that may or may not have been a laser canon that came out of his elbow.

"Your loyalty?"

"You think I'm compromised," he said, the way someone might ask for a tissue, or remark on the weather. "You think SHIELD did something to me, and you think you need to put me to sleep until you can fix it."

She didn't deny it, which was part of the reason Lev liked the woman. She wasn't a liar. He almost felt bad about braining her in his first escape.

"What do you propose?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Do you still have the training simulations? The ones where your choices mean you like cheese, or are attracted to horses, or are secretly loyal to the American government?"

Dr. Sokolova - and Lev wanted to figure out her first name, one of these days, but he had worked for people before who wanted to be called "sir" and nothing else, so a last name was good enough for now - nodded. "We do."

"Give me a training simulation, then," Lev said. "Let me show you what's in my brain, and let me keep working to get Natalia back. Let me on TV again, so I can entice her close."

"She's in the city," Dr. Sokolova said, "your Natalia. Looking for you."

"She's in the city? And you want to put me on ice?"

"I'm just saying, no need to lure her. She's here for you."

Lev stared. "Let me kill her," he said.

"We'll see," Dr. Sokolova answered, and left the room before he could make his case.

* * *

_he knows it's a simulation because of the way the walls shimmer, the way the air feels like he sets off sparks with every step_

_he knows it's a simulation because it feels familiar in the way of dreams, the home you grew up in but it's also a train_

_he knows it is a simulation because he has two arms of flesh and bone_

_he knows and he doesn't care_

_he is on a street that he knows, but he's never seen it before, and there is laughter coming from an empty lot, one behind fences so tall he can't see their tops_

_he walks toward the laughter because he is supposed to, he knows it without knowing how or why, just that it must be done_

_there are children there, but they aren't children; they're corpses, the dead bodies that he has littered across the world in the last sixty years, and the corpses laugh and play._

_the game is called baseball, he knows that, it's an american game that he should hate, but his stomach turns over when he thinks about that; he loves it in the way he loved natashenka, dark and whole_

_baseball_

_he's up to bat, without having stepped to the plate and still watching from the fence. the ball comes and he swings hard and the resulting crack echoes and splinters, fracturing into a child's scream and the whole world is ice_

_he leaves the game (he doesn't move) and finds himself before a tribunal (he is enlisting)_

_they call him a name that isn't his and he responds_

_they lay the objects on the table, and he has seen these choices before_

_he ignores the first two; the bottle of what should be water and the length of rope and he picks up the gun_

_the barrel is cold against his temple, and when he pulls the trigger he watches from behind as he falls and instead of blood, snow coats the floor_

* * *

He passed the test.

He knew he would pass the test, because he'd passed the test before, and he'd pass it again next time they gave it to him. He knew to pick the gun - the water would burn him from the inside and the rope would deliver him to his enemies, but the gun let him make the choice to put the state before himself, and that was what he did. Every time.

But he couldn't explain the baseball, or the fond feeling of familiarity that came with it. Past tests had always been about the choice, the tribunal. He had always fought monsters and braved dangers to get to them. He'd never played the game before.

It felt a little wrong, and the ghost of the scream, the shattering as he hit the ball, haunted his brain for days.

They filmed TV spots with him, all denouncing Captain America and SHIELD and Natalia. He didn't know if they aired and didn't much care, because the scream kept reverberating through his mind, every minute of every day. A child screaming.

Lev dreamed about him, blond hair and blue eyes, an angry red welt on his forehead and tears streaming down his face. He dreamed of making him laugh.

He didn't know what to do with the dreams, the scream, the simulation. He'd never had memories before, not like these. Not the kind of memories that crept into your life and kept you from thinking.

Not the kind of memories where he was a child.

Lev thought about telling Dr. Sokolova that the simulation jarred something loose. He imagined all the situations wherein that happened, and all the different ways she would placate him until she could put him under again.

And he thought about Natalia, out in the city. Lurking like a shadow, reverberating through his life the same way the scream did. She shook him to his core, and he didn't know what to do. He wasn't dumb enough to trust anyone here in the compound; he wasn't blind enough to miss that he was an asset to them, nothing more and nothing less. (And he didn't even know most people's names. He knew they'd rescued him and that they seem to need his skills and that they worked for a group called HYDRA, but what that stood for was beyond him completely. There was no love lost here. If he wanted to stay awake this time - and he'd never wanted that before, never even thought about wanting it - he'd have to find a way to leave before they were done with him.)

There were so many unknowns in his life; things he just couldn't make fit. 

The ceiling of his quarters was blank and white, a long expanse of nothing, and he imagined all of the pieces up there, all of the parts of his life that were scattered. The arm, the scream, Natalia. He didn't know why he thought about Captain America in the moment, the way his eyes were sad and dark in the SHIELD medical ward, but he did. Lev imagined the tall, blond man as someone smaller, someone shorter, and he recognized the build as one of the corpses from his simulation, one of the undead baseball players.

Lev shook his head to clear it. He'd passed the test, and they'd finish calibrating his arm in the next few days. Then he'd kill Natalia, and maybe he would get some sleep.

* * *

Perched on the balcony of a room on the 15th floor of what passed for a seedy hotel in Moscow, Clint decided he hated Russia. It wasn't fair, he really should love it, but every time he ended up in Moscow - which wasn't often, per se, but often enough - all he could think about was how bleak it felt, how desolate. He remembered the long months of research he'd done before he caught up to Natasha in Uppsala, the summer of reading about the Red Room and the Black Widow, where the New York heat had faded into dark snowbanks and Russian winters.

But being there, actually being in Russia, made the cold all too real - even in the heat of summer. The whole city stank of blood to him. But they knew the Winter Soldier was here, and Natasha and Steve were determined to find him.

(The whole Steve thing was confusing on its own merits; the guy was nice enough, and he hadn't asked too many questions about who Clint was before accepting him in New York, but Clint worked with Natasha, not Natasha and entourage. It felt intrusive, somehow, to have Captain America hitching along on their mission. Even if he was a part of SHIELD, even if he was personally invested in this guy. He should be out kissing babies and rescuing puppies from trees, not holed up in the desolate flat SHIELD kept, trading watches with Natasha until their mystery friend surfaced.)

Steve was antsy, taking more and more desperate walks around the area that the power signature had last been, pacing up and down alleyways and along the Moskva like it would suddenly divulge its answers to him.

In contrast, Natasha grew more and more still, focused more and more of her energy inward. And she pushed Clint further and further away. He wondered, distantly, in the long hours he had to think, if she even remembered the night in Bishkek, the fight that had made him feel alive again, the moment before the Winter Soldier had exploded their lives. He had wanted to kiss her, then. Hell, he had wanted to kiss her for a long time, but there was too much in the way - partnership, duty, regulations. And her own issues - or his - had never left his mind. She was at least three people, maybe more, and not all of them were people he thought he could love - or even like. He had needed to know that she was her own.

Until someone had crawled inside him and taken him apart, he had no concept of what it actually meant to be your own. And in Bishkek that night, the blood throbbing in his veins, he had understood her. It was a brief moment, glorious, and fleeting. And he wasn't sure he could ever get it back.

He turned thoughts like that over and over, flipping them this way and that until he had seen every angle of it. He was going to talk to her, when this was over, be a big boy and use his words to ask her - what? On a date? People like them didn't get to go to movies and dinner. It wasn't really on the table. Something, though. He was going to ask her something.

They'd been waiting in Moscow for the better part of two weeks, and Clint was ready to tear his own skin off; as if the blood stink wasn't bad enough, the boredom was killing him. And he was a sniper, he was bred for boredom. He felt personally slighted by Lev, or Bucky, whatever his name was, because making him wait like this, inches from Natasha but years away, was a new kind of evil soviet torture. It had to be.

Next to him, his phone beeped, sharp and shrill. A text message, from Natasha.

 _Fire_ , it read. _Muzeon Park of Arts._

Clint wasn't sure where that was, but he sprinted downstairs anyway, grabbing up shoes and his bow as he went. This wasn't the first text he'd received, but it was the first one that had his teeth on edge. He had instincts, and this felt big.

The cabbie knew where to go, and even managed to hold a broken conversation with Clint about the politics of the day, which Clint mostly nodded at. He was restless, drumming his fingers on the door as they grew closer, a plume of dark smoke now curling ominously over the buildings.

They couldn't get all the way there - which made sense if there was a fire massive enough to give off that kind of smoke, the smell of burning finally overpowering the smell of blood in Clint's nose. Still, he paid the man and took off on foot for the park, each step a warning shot.

The scene in the park was what Clint expected, to the extent that he'd expected anything. There had been an explosion, and the statues - he thought they might have been statues before they were blown up - littered the ground in pieces, some of them bloody. There was a fire raging in the center of a crater, belching acrid black smoke that slithered down his throat when he tried to breathe.

"Natasha?" he called, setting his case down to take out his bow, and slipping his quiver over his shoulder. He took a step, nocking an arrow slowly.

A cold laugh came from behind him, definitely not Natasha's laugh.

"Archer," a voice said. 

_Oh_.

"Winter Soldier," Clint replied, spinning to try and get a read on where the voice was coming from, but the smoke was thick, and the terrain unfamiliar.

"Have you come looking for Natalia?"

Clint didn't like this - hell, he hated it. This guy was not all there upstairs, and he was dangerous in the way of a feral animal - more likely to attack than not.

"Yes," Clint said, taking even measured steps away from the epicenter, scanning for his conversational partner all the while.

"Me too," the man answered. "I'm planning on killing her."

Clint had a reply for that, he really did. It was witty and well rehearsed, the kind of reply that villains just had to respect you for saying. Probably it was a pun, too. But he never got the chance. A streak of black and red - Natasha, he registered a moment later - exploded from the smoke, and slammed into Clint hard, knocking him to the ground and falling with him to rest on top of his body.

He stared into her eyes for a long moment, trying to read all the desperation there, but it was somehow inscrutable. She pressed a long finger to her lips, and he nodded. He could do quiet.

"What's the matter, Archer?" Lev, or Bucky, or whoever he was, taunted. "Don't want Natalia to die?"

Clint bit his lip. Natasha drew a star in the air with her finger and pointed vaguely northward. Clint nodded again - that would be Steve. He wasn't sure what Steve was doing, but if he was in the park, he was doing something to catch the maniac, and that was probably for the better.

The laugh came again, closer now. "Natashenka? You're so quiet. No pretty talk for your Winter Soldier?"

Natasha's eyes flashed with anger, and she pushed off of Clint and was gone before he knew what she wanted him to do, the best place for him to be.

Her voice sounded far away when she responded, but she couldn't be, not really. "My Winter Soldier was never one for pretty talk."

"Then what do you have?" he asked, and Clint rolled to his feet, holding his bow at the ready.

"I have two people who you only ever beat because we hesitated," she replied, and Clint knew what was coming next before it came - he had a moment to hit the ground again before Steve's shield flew at him, sailing over Clint's head and hitting something a few yards away with a metallic clang.

"Captain America!" Bucky said, and Clint felt it, before he saw it, felt the impact of what had to be a vibranium shield on the ground, followed by footsteps - whose? - making their way slowly towards him.

The plan clicked it Clint's mind an instant before the boots appeared, and, as silent as he could be, Clint drew his bow and shot the arrow he had - a sedative arrow, nice call - into the leg of the walker.

The Winter Soldier kicked out in rage once, twice, three times, searching for Clint, looking to hurt him, before the sedative took effect, and he fell, heavily, to the ground.

"He's down," Clint said, and then swallowed and tried again, because his throat was sore from the smoke and the adrenalin. "I got him."

Steve loomed out of the murky air and offered Clint a hand. "Nice job, Hawkeye," he said. 

Clint smiled, but he couldn't help but notice Steve's face - not so much the emotion, which was written across it like a billboard, but the bruises. It looked like Steve had taken a pummeling before Clint had arrived, and he hadn't come out on top.

Steve grinned, his smile bloodied in a way that Clint could only hope meant his teeth were still there. "I couldn't hit him," he said, by way of explanation. "He's Bucky."

Clint nodded, as if that meant anything to him.

* * *

The three of them took turns carrying the body of the Winter Soldier through the sewers of Moscow, which Natasha seemed to know intimately, until they were close enough to a safehouse that they could emerge and get their new friend inside.

He slept the day away, which gave Clint time to go and check them out of the hotel, gathering up the scant belongings they'd brought and taking a long, winding way back to where they other sat vigil over the body of - well, of whoever the guy was. That remained to be seen.

* * *

_the press of lips, chapped and unsure, hands shaking on a rooftop. they are boys, just boys, and this seems so right, and so very very very wrong--_

_the sweetness of blue eyes, a kiss in another time, but it's the same, and he laughs and says something softly, but the water is rushing in his ear and he cannot hear it--_

_the brush of a hand, smaller than his and bigger as well--_

_a goodbye, a reunion--_

_the rush of air, the smell of smoke, the sensation of falling--_

_a gentle night on a rooftop, sky above and world below, and nothing in it but the two of them--_

* * *

Lev woke in a new room, the memory of the fight at the front of his mind, the memory of Captain America's body below him, the bones of his face hard against Lev's fists.

( _and captain america's eyes are the same blue--_ )

He was strapped to a chair, of course, because heaven forbid Lev ever wake up in a fucking bed, and not strapped down to something. That would just be too much to ask.

Hushed voices swept across the room, and he recognized them - the archer and Natalia, fighting in whispers.

"We have to take him back," the archer was saying.

"No," Natalia replied. "We have to talk to him. We have to _know_."

Lev was glad he was causing dissent in their relationship. He was glad to cause dissent wherever he could.

"You're awake," a voice said, and Lev glanced up at the door, where Captain America stood, backlit by the late morning sun.

"Who are you?" Lev asked, and the man took a few steps into the room, far enough so his face was visible. The bruises were already fading, already turning green to yellow, which didn't seem right for the timeline - he couldn't have been out for more than a few days.

"You know my name," Captain America replied, and Lev did know his name. He had no idea where he had picked it up, where the information came from, but he knew it.

"Steve," he said, and was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath.

Lev shook his head to clear it. "What do you want?" he asked, watching Captain America - Steve - cross to a chair and fall into it, the exhaustion flickering across his face. "You can't take me back to SHIELD. They'll kill me."

"SHIELD won't kill you."

"They will, after I kill Natalia. Maybe you. They'll have no choice but to neutralize me."

Steve shook his head, and Lev remembered, halfway, the way light glinted off his hair. It was strange, to remember something you had never seen before.

"You used to be small," Lev said, "didn't you? Small and sick?"

Steve nodded, and if his eyes were glistening with emotion, Lev chose not to notice it. "You're breaking down," Steve said. "You're coming back, Bucky."

"My name is Lev," he protested, and there was a desperation in his voice that was, for some reason, totally sincere. He had better training than that, he should be able to hold things away from this man, from any man. He should be able to lie and cheat and wriggle out. But something about Captain America, something about Steve, made Lev's fingertips itch.

_the night is warm and the kiss is electric_

"Your name is James Barnes," Steve said. "Please believe me."

"Why should I?" 

_he swings and hits and the screaming starts ___

Steve scrubbed at his eyes with the palm of his hand. "Because-- because you know I'm telling the truth."

_a scrawny boy fighting in an alley, getting the tar kicked out of him_

Lev threw his head back and laughed. Even to his own ears, the laugh sounded insane, unhinged. He couldn't stop- he just laughed, the sound bubbling over until he thought he would choke, echoing and reverberating and filling his mind with desperate, crazy noise. He had no idea how long it went for. He felt strikes across his face, heard voices calling his name. Someone might have shook him, but he didn't feel it. In his world, there was only laughter, falling from his mouth to litter the ground with the remains of his sanity.

When he stopped, finally, when there was nothing left inside him to sustain the laughter, the light in the room had changed, and he was alone.

* * *

Natasha watched the night sky, the stars lost to the city lights and the moon almost obscured behind a building. She liked cities, but for starwatching, they were downright useless.

Lev- Bucky, she supposed, but Lev to her -was down in the house with Steve, probably still laughing like a madman, and Clint was out pacing the city streets, a caged animal restless for release. She wasn't sure who she felt worse for.

Probably herself. She felt pretty bad for herself.

She heard Steve before she saw him, his footsteps measured with military precision that distinguished him from Clint - who had spent more time in the military than Steve, oddly.

"Hi," she said, not looking at her new companion as he settled in next to her. "Did you leave him alone?"

Steve shrugged. "No, Clint is back."

"Still sulking?"

"He really wants to call base, bring Bucky in," Steve said.

Natasha sighed. "I know he does. And I know he's right. But this isn't a _mark_ , you know? It's personal."

"They're all personal," Steve said, leaning back on his hands and craning his neck to see the sky. "Not much to see up here, is there?"

"Not really, no."

"What would you say if I told you Bucky was my first kiss?"

Natasha laughed, bitterly. "I'd say get in line, Rogers."

"It was a night like this, on the roof of our building in Brooklyn. We were twelve and drinking closet wine he'd filched from his grandma."

"Closet wine?"

Steve nodded. "1932," he said. "Prohibition. You made alcohol, then, and your grandson stole it."

"I was sixteen," she said. "We trained together. He had this flawless American accent, and I was nimble and quick. He tried to tell me I was too young, but I was the Black Widow, even then. Took me less than a day to change his mind."

"Do you love him?"

"I did." Natasha smiled. "But it was a long time ago, before I knew better." She regarded him for a long moment. "Do you?"

The light was dim, but Natasha was pretty sure Steve was flushed - maybe from the chill in the night air, but maybe from talk of love and kisses.

"I'll always love him," Steve said. "I'd move worlds for him."

Natasha stood, wiping specks of dirt off of her legs. "I want to try to talk to him."

"He wants to kill you."

"He can get in line, Rogers."

* * *

Lev had been having a rather enjoyable stare-off with the Archer, the kind of sport where two men glowered at each other until one broke. He wasn't sure who was winning or why they were playing, but they both heard Natalia enter the house, her heels clicking rhythmically along the length of the hallway to the door of his room.

"Clint," she said, warmly, as she opened the door, and Lev couldn't help but notice that the Archer perked up at the sound of her voice. There was his weakness - there was the way Lev would escape.

"Can I have a minute with him?" she asked, gesturing towards the chair Lev was still strapped to.

The Archer nodded. "Sure. I'll be here if you need anything."

Natalia let her hand linger on the Archer's bicep for just a moment too long as he left, and Lev had found her weakness, too, the complimentary chink in her armor. She was a fool, Natalia was, for letting anyone know she cared about this man. Especially Lev.

The door clicked shut, and the air in the room stilled, becoming heavy and oppressive. Natalia stared at him, her level gaze not threatening or challenging the way the Archer's was, and not beseeching in the way of Captain America.

"Lyova," she said, after a long minute. It had been a lifetime - two - since anyone had cared enough to call him Lyova.

"Natalia Alianovna," he replied, and she flinched minutely at the formality, but she shook it off before his blow had a chance to really land.

"Do you want to kill me?"

He thought for a moment - yes, in truth, he wanted her dead. But the longer he thought about it, the more absurd it seemed. He wanted her to die because HYRDA had told him to, because they had told him she was a spy and a traitor and _should_ die.

And he had blown up a HYDRA base before they could decide the same about him, stepping over Dr. Sokolova's corpse - or what was left of it - without much of a care for anything or anyone.

HYDRA would want him dead, when and if they found out what he had done. They would come after him like he had come after Natalia, like he had killed scores of men before her.

But she could protect him - she and her friends - if he wanted. 

"Yes," he said.

She nodded. "I tried to find you."

Lev didn't let his surprise show across his face. "What?"

"When I woke up. I tried to find you. Wrote жёлтая on walls across Russia, hoping you'd see it and find me."

"I never did."

Natalia shrugged. "I think you were asleep, Lyova." 

"Asleep," he huffed a laugh. "That's one way to put it. Are there others?"

"No," she shook her head. "None that I know of. Petrovich and Belov are dead."

"Good."

Natalia smiled bitterly, like a knife, and Lev couldn't help but love her for it, for just a moment. And that was the crux of it. He loved her, in the end, and he always would.

"Tell me what we said that night before I was activated," he said, shoving the want to touch her face down as far as it would go - which was silly, anyway, what with being restrained.

"I said you were mine, like the darkness and the night, and you said I was yours, like blood and snow."

"Are you still mine?"

She smiled again, this time sadly. "No," she said.

Lev let his smile show, though he felt like knives were coursing through his veins. "Because you're with the Archer?"

"No," she said again. "Because I'm mine."

Lev swallowed hard. "Natalia--" he sighed. "Who am I?"

She leaned forward, cupping his cheek with one hand. "That's not up to me," she said, and he was amazed, stunned, at the amount of kindness in her voice. What was this world, that Natalia Romanova knew how to be kind?

He would never know, later, what caused it, but the levees had been weakening since he'd been awoken and gone to Germany, and something about Natalia's hand on his face, something about her sweetness, caused them to stop buckling and break. Memories flooded Lev's mind, hard and sudden.

_natashenka dances across a training room, spinning like a blade on its edge and_

_the soft press of lips on a rooftop, the taste of breath slightly sour from booze and steve's blue eyes and_

_waking and waking and waking and_

"I remember," he said, and a chill swept through his body. He felt the sweat prick his forehead and his throat got tight. He wasn't supposed to remember this. This was supposed to stay hidden. This was never--

_lying on a table and the electrodes are on his temple and belov tells him to forget and he does because he is a good soldier and a good man and he will kill captain america and_

_he hits the baseball and_

"Lev?" Natasha asked, jolting him back to reality. "Remember what?"

He shook his head, as if to clear it. "Baseball."

* * *

Steve wasn't eavesdropping, really.

He was mostly lurking around the door of Bucky's room with Clint, catching snippets and seconds of Natasha's voice.

But they weren't eavesdropping.

"I don't like him," Clint muttered, leaning against the wall.

"I know," Steve said.

"He's dangerous."

"So are we."

Clint shot him a look that could have curled the wallpaper, if the safehouse had any on top of its chipped paint and crumbling plaster.

"I'm not dangerous to Natasha."

Steve bit his tongue, because Clint had been dangerous, the first time they'd met. Clint had almost taken the Helicarrier out, with a team of ten men. Clint was plenty dangerous, to Natasha and everyone else around him. He just happened to be in control at the moment.

"You're in love with her," he said instead, using a finger to work a small piece of plaster loose from the corner of the doorframe.

"What if I am?"

Steve shrugged. It didn't matter to him one way or the other how these two ran their lives. It really didn't affect him in any meaningful way, because they were professionals of the highest order. And it wasn't like a romantic bond was always a liability in the field. Hell, love had driven Steve to become an actual hero, rather than a mascot.

"She loves you, too," he said, and Clint just scoffed, a harsh exhale of scorn that made Steve inexplicably furious. They really had no idea what they had.

"She's in there with her psychotic ex boyfriend," Clint said, after a long pause. "I don't think she loves me the way you think she does."

Steve shrugged. "Maybe not."

He was going to say more, make some kind of point about the fact that Natasha had fought with every bit of her reserve to bring Clint back, that she hadn't exactly left his side since New York, but the woman herself chose that moment to emerge from the prisoner's room, her eyes bright. Steve wondered if she'd been crying, but that seemed unlikely. Or it had, a few weeks ago. Now he wasn't quite sure.

She nodded at him. "Lev wants to talk to you," she said, before turning on her heel and grinning broadly - which was fifty times creepier than the thought of her crying.

"Oh," Steve replied, looking at the door, which was hanging open. He knew it was a matter of steps - one foot in front of the other, no harder than boot camp - to go into the room. But the man in there. He wasn't Bucky. He was wearing Bucky's face, sure, but it was twisted with rage and with time. It was wrong. And it didn't help that the shade in Bucky's body wanted Steve dead. It hurt, if Steve was being honest, it burned him like acid to see his best friend like that.

Clint laid a hand on Steve's shoulder. "Want me to come with?"

Steve shook his head, wordlessly, and forced himself forward. He heard Clint say something to Natasha, something in a language that wasn't English, his voice low, soft and tender, but they were miles behind him, acres away as he stepped into Bucky's room.

Bucky looked sick. He was pale under his black hair, his breath ragged like he had run a marathon. Steve felt his heart drop to the pit of his stomach, and he balled his hands into fists. "I can't untie you," he said, because it seemed only fair to admit that off the bat.

Bucky looked at him, his eyes empty of emotion.

"Steve," he gasped, "I remember."

"Remember?"

Bucky closed his eyes and swallowed. "May. Middle of May. Empty lot. Theo on the mound. I'm up. Man on second. He throws, I swing, it's over the fence. And then-- and then--" Bucky looked at Steve again, and his face looked clear for the first time since the medbay at SHIELD headquarters. He looked like himself. "You."

Steve bit his lip. "Your ball hit me," he said.

Bucky nodded frantically. "You were hurt, and so little and when I came out you were howling in pain and you got up off the floor and you tried to punch me."

Tears pricked the corner of Steve's eyes. "And you took me for ice cream."

Bucky nodded. "Vanilla. You like it with jimmies, but we couldn't afford jimmies."

Steve couldn't breathe. He wanted to, wanted to make the air cycle through his lungs, but he just couldn't get it to. "You like strawberry," he said, though he wasn't quite sure how he managed to do that without breathing.

"I remember - a night on the roof," Bucky said.

Steve nodded, and his fingers found his mouth, tracing the bow of his lips like the ghost of a kiss. "Me too."

They stared at each other for a long moment, neither daring to move. Finally, Steve couldn't stand it anymore; he literally had no control over his body as his legs decided it was time to cross the room in two short strides and fold Bucky into his arms, hugging him fiercely. Which was awkward, what with him still tied to a chair.

"Tell me your name," Steve said, as he released his grip.

"James Barnes," Bucky said. "And Lev. The Winter Soldier. All of it."

Steve didn't say anything, he just moved behind the chair to untie their captive.

* * *

There was a lot to be done, and so few days to do it. They had to report to SHIELD, they had to make plans for getting out of Moscow, and for contingencies in case of HYDRA attack. Steve was good at the planning part, but when it came to the report, to actually calling Hill and telling her that they were coming back with the Winter Soldier who, by the by, now believed he was Steve Rogers' best friend from 1945, well. All three of the agents present balked.

So they wasted days in the safehouse at the edge of the city, talking about the past and the things they remembered, and the things they were going to have to do in the future, the people they were going to have to kill to keep Bucky safe.

Natasha finally broke down on the third day and started writing the report, spending long minutes staring at a white computer screen, a black cursor blinking like a taunt. How could she tell this story? How could she do it justice?

She gave up after a few hours, and retreated to the roof, which was where Clint found her as the sun started to set.

"Hi," he said, dropping down next to where she sat, her feet dangling over the eaves.

"Hi," she replied.

"What are we doing?"

She shook her head and chose not to reply with something glib, because she knew what he was asking. "I don't know. Clint, I-- I don't know how to do this."

He slipped an arm around her shoulders, which caused her to shiver. The night was cold, but she hadn't even noticed it until he touched her, his warmth setting off a reaction somehow. 

"We'll do it together," he said.

"You suck at writing reports."

He laughed softly. "So do you."

"Yeah, but I can blame English not being my first language."

She was giggling now, a strange airy feeling that might have been the cold or his arm, or just the adrenalin of the past few days, of seeing and fighting Lev again, wearing off.

It seemed obvious when he did it, like the night in Bishkek when this had all started, but at the time, the last thing Natasha expected from her partner was for him to hook a knuckle under her chin and tilt her head up so he could kiss her.

It was a soft kiss, almost chaste, and sweet. She smiled as she pulled away. "Clint--"

He nodded, dropping his hands to his sides. "I'm sorry. I just-- if I hadn't I would have always wondered."

"No," she said, because Clint was, in fact, dense enough to take that as a rejection. "It was-- I mean, you could have used words and not just _done_ it, but. I like you, Clint. You're-- you're steady. You're the bullseye, you know?"

"But?"

"No but," she said. "Just, understand. In the house, down there, I thought I loved him. The way I loved a severed artery, a cleanly broken bone, the kick of a pistol. But I'm not-- I don't love those things anymore. And he was never that man, and I was never that girl. We're-- more."

Clint looked lost. "So, you don't love him?"

"No," she said. "I don't love him."

"But you don't want me?"

His voice was sad, but not broken, and Natasha smiled, reveling, for the second time that week, at her ability to be kind. She reached out and wordlessly found his hand where it was pressed into the rough surface of the roof, his palm dented with the memory, and she laced their fingers together. 

It wasn't an answer, but that was only because she didn't have one, and he didn't press it further. He just nudged her gently with his shoulder and they watched as the sun continued to sink below the horizon.

* * *

_Make a decision_ they told him. _Make a choice_. But Lev didn't know how to make those. He hadn't made his own choices for a lifetime or three, and the idea that he got to decide things - decide anything at all - seemed unflinchingly alien.

They told him he could come back with them, and work for SHIELD. But SHIELD was just another master, and he'd had his fill of masters. He'd had his fill of being the puppet to someone else's ambition. He had no need of SHIELD.

They told him he could walk away, walk into the smoke (and oh, how the Archer hated that option, how it made him pout and scowl) and they would let him. They would not chase him. But he had been alone for so long, he had been _without_ \- there were no friends in his sleep, there were no companions to talk to and understand him. He'd had his fill of solitude.

They told him they could recover his memories fully, that there was technology that could open his mind the rest of the way, and the trickle of former lives could turn to a flood - he'd get back the sound of his mother's voice and the taste of army rations and the pain of all his broken hearts. He didn't want those things, not if they had to be forced out of, or into, him. He had too many artificial parts already - aside from his arm, he possessed a whole brain full of lies that he couldn't quite sort out - and he didn't want to give anyone else license to add to his artificiality.

What they didn't offer - what no one said he could have - was Natasha. She'd made herself clear when they spoke that she was no longer his, and he came to terms with the idea that if she had ever loved him--and he believed that she must have when they were blood and bone, when they were shadow and pain--then it was gone. And he wasn't sure, given the woman she'd become, given the smiles that weren't feral flashes of teeth and the aura of calm she possessed, that he would even want her. He realized that he barely knew who she was anymore, if she wasn't the weapon he'd loved.

He contemplated Steve, the blond boy of his memories and the man who he was programmed to kill, and he thought about asking him to travel, to rediscover the world together. But Steve wasn't the child he'd been, any more than Lev was. He was big, now, and capable, and adult. He didn't need protecting, and he didn't seem to need the parts of Bucky that Lev had. (And maybe there were parts he would need, some day, and Lev would have them when that day came, but as it stood, he was without.)

"What's out there?" he asked Steve one night, as they took a measured stroll around the block of their safehouse. "What is this world like?"

Steve thought for a long moment. "It's-- amazing," he said, with a faint smile. "Computers are like nothing we ever imagined, and the things they've done with food, Bucky. You won't believe what people have thought to put cheese into."

Lev remembered cheese, the lines outside the corner grocery where people waited to trade their red stamps in for four ounces of crumbly dry chalk that the government called food. 

He shook his head to chase the stale memories out. "But the people?"

Steve smiled broadly. "They're the same. Exactly the same."

He knew that Steve meant that as a pro, as a good thing, but Lev had seen some terrible things - terrible people - in his time, and he wasn't sure how to exist in a world with computers and cheese and people who were still people.

"I want to see it," he said, instead of anything meaningful.

"Me too," Steve replied, and that was it. That was the opening that Lev was meant to take, it was the door he was meant to walk through. He could, so easily. He could say something like _then let's go_ and Steve would - they would go and see all the things they had talked about as kids - Paris and Rome and Peking.

But he didn't.

They walked in silence a moment longer, rounding the last corner of their walk.

As the safehouse bobbed into view, Steve sighed and glanced sideways through his lashes at Lev.

"You're really not Bucky, are you?"

Lev shrugged. "I am. I am. I just-- Things have really changed. I've really changed."

"And you need to figure out what that means."

"No," he replied, shaking his head, because he knew what it meant. It meant things had changed, and he wasn't the strapping American boy he had been before the war, before the fall, before the Red Room. It meant not knowing, it meant seeking, it meant that the things he thought he wanted - things like killing Natalia or Steve - were things that had to be evaluated over and over, to make see if they were really his, or just some lie that someone else put there. "I just need time with the idea."

Steve nodded. "I can give you time."

Lev smiled as they reached the house, and Natalia and Clint's voices floated down from the second floor.

"Thank you."

* * *

They left Moscow on a Tuesday in a kind of misty rain that managed to soak everything through, no matter how Clint positioned his umbrella.

He and Natasha were headed home - New York. They were boarding a plane in a few hours, and heading back to SHIELD to be yelled at and made to do Sisyphean amounts of paperwork on this debacle of a mission. He was okay with that, he thought, because it was him and Natasha. They hadn't really spoken about their relationship - and how he hated that word, how it made him feel fourteen again - since that night on the roof. But there was an easy silence between them, the kind of dynamic they'd had before Loki, before New York, before the Winter Soldier. They were back to their very own facsimile of normal, and that suited him just fine. They had a long time to get it right, and figure out what that meant.

Steve was taking Bucky - or Lev, whatever - to London, where they would spend some time with STRIKE neutralizing the more dastardly applications of the robot arm Bucky was sporting, before sending him on his Great World Tour. They'd decided he would check in with Steve any time he changed countries, but other than that, Steve and Natasha were willing to let the villain wander.

(And if Clint's purely reasoned "Remember all those times he wanted to kill us?" argument got shouted down in a chorus of "Mind control!" he wasn't bitter, per se. He was, however, brushing up on his "I told you so" dance for the next time seventeen civilians showed up with "Death to Captain America!!" carved in their butts or whatever. And his report would say as much, which was something that neither Natasha nor Steve could control.)

The last time they'd left Moscow, it had been via helicopter, Natasha still healing from her alley fight with twenty of Drakov's finest goons. Neither of them had slept a wink on that trip; he couldn't speak for her, but Clint had been worried, for himself, that if he let his attention wane, she'd slit his throat and dump his body.

This time, they went to an actual airport, where they checked in and presented the false credentials SHIELD had given them. They sat in cushy chairs in first class and sipped drinks and listened to a recorded message about seat belts and flotation devices, both of which Clint thought he and Natasha could make into rather convincing weapons if they had to.

It was strange, in some ways, to not be flying a plane he rode on; the lack of power was unfamiliar to him, but the acceleration of takeoff and the thrill of climbing were the same, no matter where he sat.

Natasha grinned at him as they leveled out, twined their fingers together like she had on the roof and then yawned like a cat, the inside of her mouth a vivid pink. He smiled at her, and let go of her hand so he could slip an arm around her shoulders.

She didn't say anything, just leaned in and rested her head on his shoulder. Clint smiled and pressed a kiss to her forehead as her breathing steadied and she slept.


End file.
